When Maria Lipka called her partner Bryan Young, she was shocked to find that he was already on his way to Ukraine.

A week earlier, the pair, who lived in Tbilisi, Georgia, got into a heated argument after Young said that he wanted to go to Ukraine to defend the country from a full-scale Russian invasion.

The 51-year-old Army veteran from California said he needed to go because it was his duty to protect the free world, Lipka told Insider in a series of interviews.

“I told him that I absolutely don’t understand why he should do it,” she said. “We didn’t speak for a week.”

“I didn’t even have an opportunity just to say goodbye,” she added.

Four months later, he would be dead.

Young traveled to Kyiv, via Constantinople, in March — roughly a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started on February 24.

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The 51-year-old served as a US infantryman between November 1990 and April 2003, before being forced to retire due to injury.

After a lonely two years in lockdown, the news of a war in Ukraine — only a few thousand miles away — gave Young a new sense of purpose.

Read more: Business Insider